Huila, Colombia 72%

Big notes of vanilla bean, caramel, and roasted pecans make this one of our most approachable, and satisfying, dark chocolates.

The full story: We made the first batch of this for folks in the Chocolate Club back in November of 2025. For that first round, we only had about 10 pounds, barely enough for everyone in the Chocolate Club. Now it's back, and officially part of our single-origin lineup.

We recently received 150 pounds of cacao beans from Huila, Colombia. And that begs the question: how much chocolate will that make? Oddly enough, 150 pounds of cacao beans makes about 150 pounds of dark chocolate... because roasting and winnowing removes about 30% of the beans weight, and we add back about that much organic cane sugar to arrive at a 72% dark chocolate.

This cacao grows in Southern Colombia and is fermented and dried at La Cueva Del Oso, or "The Bear Cave", which is a new fermenteria that is returning cacao production to a region of Colombia better known for coffee in recent years.

There was a time when Huila was the beating heart of Colombian cacao production, but the damming of the Magdalena River in 2015 changed that. Built by a Spanish conglomerate, the El Quimbo dam flooded about 21,000 acres of prime cacao ground. And because cacao grows at much lower elevations than coffee, the floodwaters wiped out cacao farms while leaving coffee plantations intact, reshaping the region's landscape and agricultural signature.

La Cueva Del Oso represents a meaningful step toward reviving the tradition of Huila cacao. We worked with them to evaluate early samples, and were immediately struck by distinctive notes of roasted pecans, vanilla bean, and caramel in this cacao. We hope to visit them in the coming years to see it all for ourselves.